Nvidia GeForce Driver 182.06: Performance Express-Test. Page 5

In our previous mini-review we discussed what advantages the new Catalyst 9.1 driver can bring the owners of ATI Radeon graphics cards. Today its Nvidia’s turn – the company has just officially released a new GeForce driver version 182.06. So, today we are going to investigate what performance improvements it brings on.

Left 4 Dead

GeForce 182.06 driver delivered even more than had promised in this game: instead of the 11% improvement we recorded a 20% to 40% performance gain!

Looks like they have optimized the SLI technology support; however, even a single-GPU GeForce GTX 285 benefitted from the new driver, especially in 2560x1600. It sped up by 27%! In lower resolutions it managed to catch up with and outperform a dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295 running on 181.22 driver version! As we can see, Nvidia doesn’t just stick to their promises: they sometimes deliver way more.

Race Driver: GRID

The last game in our today’s test session was supposed to show up to 10% performance improvement in high resolutions with enabled full-screen antialiasing. And that is the only case when Nvidia didn’t fully comply with their promises: GeForce GTX 295 gained 3% at best, while GeForce GTX 285 did in fact hit 10%-13% higher numbers.

Moreover, the minimal performance of the flagship solution would occasionally drop with the new driver.